This business of Facebook banning Australian news has some interesting implications and raises some important questions.
Regardless of whether you think the Australian government is doing the right thing by requiring Facebook to pay for content taken from news sites, a far more important issue needs to be discussed.
The Argument Against Corporate Coercion
On the one hand, you have a situation where a private entity has the reach and power to threaten a democratically elected government. Not only did Facebook cut off Australian news media, they also cut off government advisory sites and weather information.
In essence, Facebook threw all their toys out of the pram because the government of this country refused to bow to their demands.
This is a matter of grave concern for governments around the world, that their nations can be punished on such a scale by a privately owned entity they have no control over.
The Argument Against Government Coercion
But, on the other side of the coin, how did Facebook gain this level of power in the first place? Facebook was in essence democratically elected, by people around the world, as their medium of choice for communicating with others.
How exactly does this process differ from a government election? Nobody ever held a gun to anyone’s head and said “You MUST use Facebook.” Everone freely chose to use that platform. And everyone all freely choose to continue to use it in SPITE of the many other options available – MeWe, Parler, Gab, Minds, Rumble, Bitchute to name just a few.
In fact, it could be argued that the election of Facebook was more democratic than the election of our government. We had a huge number of choices for social media before Facebook came on the scene.
In our government elections we only have two parties to choose, both equally corrupt and both equally wilfully ignorant of the vox populi. Yet voting for any other party is pointless because Australian elections are rigged by the two-party-preferred system, which prevents any third party from forming government even if they did win majority vote!
Democracy And Herd Mentality
With social media, we had a free choice long before Facebook existed. Remember AOL, GeoCities, Orkut, Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace? These were all social media sites. At various times they all dominated the social media marketplace. Any one of them had the potential to dominate the market to the level Facebook has, but they didn’t.
So what made YOU vote for Facebook as the social media master? Was it the ease of use? Peer pressure? Advertising? Games?
If you don’t like the way Facebook behaves, you are free at any time to close your account and/or use another social media site. But you won’t do that because all your friends are there. Nevertheless, that’s a democratic decision. It’s no different to voting Liberal or Labor because all your friends vote Liberal or Labor.
Yet, at the same time, is it right to allow Big Tech to exploit herd mentality to cement this power over people and nations? Guess what – governments have been doing this since the time of Sargon of Akkad and probably long before that. Whether it’s Facebook or Google, Liberal or Labor, makes no difference in the outcome.
What Do We Do Now?
Which brings me to my point: Herd mentality is humanity’s greatest weakness. It allows unscrupulous individuals to take advantage of and control our lives for their own aggrandisement, and do so under the guise of democracy and free choice. It is something something we need to confront in ourselves, as individuals and as nations, if we are ever to free ourselves from the grip of narcissists and megalomaniacs and to reach for the stars.
